'Greek, Sir, is like lace; every man gets as much of it as he can" was a quotation (from Samuel Johnson) that was often on the lips of Hugh Lloyd-Jones, regius professor of Greek at Oxford from 1960 until 1989, who has died aged 87. The brilliance and evident conviction with which Lloyd-Jones upheld the value of Greek in a changed world (Greek in a Cold Climate was the title of one of his collections of essays) made him one of the dominant figures in classical scholarship in the second half of the 20th century. He had a minute mastery of the language, seen for instance in his early edition of Menander's newly discovered play Dyskolos (Menandri Dyscolus, 1960). But he also increasingly insisted on the greatness of Greek culture, its poetry in particular, and its contribution to later civilisation.

The culture that he admired was conceived in hard Nietzschean terms, far removed from conventional classicism. Lloyd-Jones's Greeks had a grimly realistic view of man's place in a universe controlled by gods who ran it in their own interests, not in man's. Greek religion, so often seen as one of the few domains where the Greeks have to be apologised for, was for him as close to being true as any theistic system could be. A certain ambiguity in his conception, however, was never resolved: was Zeus, though certainly no bleeding heart liberal, fundamentally just in his dealings with men, or was the justice of Zeus (the title of his book of 1971) simply incommensurable with human standards of justice?

Lloyd-Jones was educated at the Lycée Français in London and at Westminster school, where he received an old-fashioned training in the ancient languages and amazed his masters by his feats of memory. Second world war service in the intelligence corps in the far east interrupted his undergraduate career at Christ Church, Oxford, but learning Japanese did not divert him from the classics. He taught for a period in both Cambridge and Oxford before being elected at an unusually young age to the regius chair in 1960.

In scholarship, he was a sprinter, not a long-distance runner. Justice of Zeus was his only true monograph. Instead, he wrote articles and reviews in great profusion, often inspired by the discovery of new texts and often providing definitive solutions. These technical works are collected in the three large volumes of his Academic Papers, the first two published in 1990, the third in 2005.

His most monumental work arose almost by accident. The Supplementum Hellenisticum (1983, joint edited with PJ Parsons) of newly published or neglected Hellenistic poetry was originally designed for the Kleine Texte (small texts) series, but grew to 863 pages. Another major work (the Oxford text of Sophocles, 1990, with an accompanying volume of textual discussions) was also a collaboration (with NG Wilson). The broader educated public knew him from reviews in the weeklies and from essays on the relation of figures such as Goethe, Humboldt, Gladstone, Wagner, Freud and Gilbert Murray to the classics. These masterly syntheses (the most important collected in Blood for the Ghosts, 1982) in sparse and sinewy prose were compared by one reviewer to the essays of Mark Pattison, the Victorian scholar and former rector of Lincoln College.

Most of the essays were occasional in origin. Lloyd-Jones had no "research programme". He was a striking example of the kind of brilliant, vivid and anarchic figure whom it is hard to imagine holding a major chair in the modern, managed and managerial university. It was always a pleasure at sub-faculty meetings to watch him ostentatiously working his way through the week's crop of offprints while the routine business droned on.

He was nonetheless a committed teacher who prepared lectures and classes with great care. As a supervisor, he had the gift of making graduates believe in the value both of their topic and of the contribution they were making to it. To hear one's unfinished thesis described as "your book" was a great tonic. His graduate classes, mostly on technical topics, were inspiring, entertaining and alarming (would the fierce denunciations of the incompetence of scholars past and present strike anyone in the room?) in about equal measure. He was energetic, too, and successful in exploiting his wide range of foreign contacts to combat the provincialism of Oxford.

A famous and formidable polemicist, he was involved in many strongly-worded scholarly controversies. Everything about him was intense: his diction, his gaze, his characteristic gestures (the stabbing right index finger, the right hand slapped ferociously on the left wrist), even his way of entering a lecture theatre. A zest for life underlay the intensity. He had a great relish for the ridiculous, and one could not be with him for long without hearing his characteristic, gurgling laugh.

Deliberately outrageous opinions flowed from him, and polished epigrams (a sample: "Dora Russell was one of the most disagreeable women Bertrand Russell ever married"). He was not, however, just a hugely entertaining companion but also a most loyal and supportive friend. Cats, too, he loved, showing their photos and recounting their talents with the same simple pleasure as the most unsophisticated and un-Nietzschean of cat-worshippers.

Lloyd-Jones held four honorary doctorates and was a member of five foreign academies as well as the British. He was knighted on retirement in 1989. From that year he lived very happily with his second wife, the classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She survives him, along with the two sons and daughter of his first marriage.